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Learning Python, motivation problem
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Learning Python, motivation problem
#1
Hello fellow Pythoners,
I'm newbie at programming and I have decided to try myself with Python.
I bought a couple of books, bookmarked some tutorials and tried to learn the thing for 2 months now.
That included: variables and data types, lists, dictionaries, if's, loops, functions, classes, handling files (CSVs, JSONs).
I made some progress up to the point that I'm not a total beginner now, but I'm not sure how to proceed further to the more advanced topics.
Here is the list of books that I've used:
'A Smarter Way to Learn Python', by Mark Myers (very useful for total beginners, covered 100% of it),
'Python Crash Course', by Eric Matthes (good explanatory book, I've covered cca. 30% of it),
'Automate the boring stuff with Python', by Al Sweigart (covered cca. 50% of it, good explanatory chapters but the projects are hard to grasp for beginners), and
'Learning Python' by Mark Lutz (monster book with 1500 pages, covered around 20% of it, very detailed but somewhat complicated for beginners).

Since I'm studying alone, without mentor or course, I'm not sure how should I proceed further. Pursuing those books is becoming complicated, because the concepts are increasing in difficulty and simply following and re-typing the code within them is not so useful as at the beginning. I should do projects but it's easier said than done (with my very limited knowledge).
I've found a dozen of practice tutorials and websites, but it is very painful work, struggling with each problem, googling, reviewing other solutions on Stackoverflow, Youtube etc. I feel like the more I learn, less I know.

My ultimate goal is to switch my career to coding and eventually to try to get a junior coding job. However, my motivation is starting to decline as I'm baffled with sheer complexity of a functions, methods, modules (and besides Python, I should be learning other stuff as well).

Any useful advice how to proceed further? Maybe someone was(is) in a similar situation?
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#2
I'd recommend you stop obsessing about following lots of tutorials and reading lots of books and instead focus on your interests outside of the programming world. Use what you already know to do something that interests you. Any tasks you have to do regularly in your normal life, or in following your hobbies.

Start simple. It does not matter if what you do is much simpler than some of the things you have been learning. Doing something that relates to your life, your interests, your work has a lot of benefit. You will start to focus on enhancing things, adding capabilities, making a difference to stuff you know something about.

As your desire, your ambition, to add features grow beyond some of the basics of programming, you will find you start to explore how to do certain things with more focus and more enthusiasm.

It does not matter if your are cataloguing your DVDs, valuing your stamps, finding how rich your vocabulary on tweets is, calculating focusing distances for photography, balancing your books, controlling the watering of plants (I'm not kidding - look at what people do with $10 Raspberry Pi computers, read the free online PDF copies of the MagPi magazines), generating characters for RPG games, etc.
I am trying to help you, really, even if it doesn't always seem that way
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